There’s a Word for Using Truthful Facts to Deceive: Paltering

Virtually everyone lies when we interact or communicate with others. Hard to believe? Well, here is what the evidence tells us: people (you and me included!) tell, on average, one or two lies per day. Many of these lies are harmless: e.g., giving a spouse or friend a compliment we really don’t mean. Others, however, when mixed in with actual facts, have important consequences.

Take politics, where candidates all too frequently employ such distortions to influence voters.

For example, in the U.S. vice-presidential debate between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence, Kaine pushed Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to release his tax returns. (Trump has said he’d do it once the Internal Revenue Service completed an ongoing audit.) Kaine asserted that “Richard Nixon released tax returns when he was under audit,” leaving the impression that Nixon, a Republican, did so while running for re-election, creating a precedent for Trump. But as the New York Times pointed out, “Mr. Nixon released his taxes while under audit — but it was not until a year after his 1972 re-election.”

There’s a word for this way of using truthful facts to deceive: “paltering.” It is not unique to politics. In our recent work, Todd Rogers and Richard Zeckhauser of the Harvard Kennedy School, Maurice Schweitzer of Wharton, Mike Norton of Harvard Business School, and I studied the use of paltering in negotiations. Negotiators often have access to unique information, and they depend on one another’s claims about that information. Thus, negotiators can often exploit their counterparts by using deception to gain an advantage.

Deception in negotiations can take many forms, ranging from outright lies to half-truths. Consider the following example. An HR manager has one worthy candidate for a particular position in the organization. Sharing this fact may lead the candidate to use it to gain an edge in the negotiations about the terms of the job (e.g., salary, bonuses, benefits). Thus, the HR manager has a motivation to mislead the person about the competition for the position and could do so in different ways.

An outright lie would involve stating something that is not true, such as, “We have many other qualified candidates who are interested in the position and could fill it perfectly.” Another possibility would be to omit information about this very issue from the conversation. For example, the HR manager might remain silent about whether or not there are alternative candidates, which might lead the person who is being currently considered to form a mistaken impression on her own.

But our research suggests that, in a negotiation like this one, paltering is the most likely strategy that negotiators use. It would involve telling the candidate something along this line: “After advertising this position widely, we received over 100 résumés. My assistant narrowed these down to a shortlist of 10, each of whom has excellent credentials, skills, and experience.” These statements may all be true, but they convey the false impression that other qualified candidates could fill the position when, in fact, this is not the case.

Like outright lies, paltering is an active form of deception. However, our research shows, because paltering involves the use of truthful statements, and lying outright involves the use of false statements, would-be deceivers tend to prefer to palter rather than lie in negotiation. One study of 550 adults working in a wide range of industries that my colleagues and I conducted found that potential deceivers perceived paltering to be more ethically acceptable than lying outright.

We asked participants to imagine selling a used car on eBay.com, and told them they would receive a bonus if they actually succeeded in selling it. Participants were told that the car had some issues in the past year and that a potential buyer wrote to them asking whether the car has ever had problems. In one condition, participants could choose to tell the truth or palter. In a second condition, participants could choose whether to lie outright or tell the truth. They knew, in both conditions, that the chances of selling the car were the highest if they lied outright (80%) and the lowest if they told the truth (30%), as it is often the case in real negotiations. If they were to palter, their chances of success would be somewhere in between (60%).

The result? Participants who faced the choice of either paltering or telling the truth misled the buyer more often (71%) than those who faced the choice of either lying outright or telling the truth (55%), even if this came at a cost.

Here is an interesting fact that explains why people prefer paltering over telling outright lies: It allows them to maintain an image of themselves as honest and trustworthy individuals (after all, their paltering was truthful). We all care about being good people and being seen by others as such. In fact, when it comes to honesty, we generally believe we are better than others.

One of my favorite examples of this tendency we all share since we are human comes from a survey conducted by U.S. News and World Report in 1997. The survey asked 1,000 Americans the following question: “Who do you think is most likely to get into heaven?” Respondents gave then-President Bill Clinton a 52% chance, Michael Jordan a 65% chance (maybe in part because the Bulls had won the NBA championship that year), and Mother Teresa a 79%. But guess who the person completing the survey rated the most likely to get into heaven? Themselves, with a score of 87%.

Importantly, though, targets of paltering view paltering as far less ethical than palterers do, our research finds. In fact, whereas palterers are likely to focus on their use of truthful statements to justify the ethicality of their behavior, targets focus on being actively deceived and conclude that the use of paltering is unethical.

In addition to examining the beliefs that palterers and their targets have about this form of deception, we also explored the short- and long-term consequences of paltering. We invited people to participate in studies that involved negotiating with another party. The negotiations focused on just one issue: the price of the object up for sale (e.g., a piece of land), and were thus zero-sum in nature. In other words, a better price for the seller was a worse price for the buyer.

We directed some of our participants to palter when asked questions about an issue in the negotiation they’d rather avoid discussing. We asked others to answer such questions truthfully. We found that paltering helps negotiators walk away with more money in their pocket, but it comes at a cost: Paltering increases the odds of not reaching an agreement at the bargaining table and can greatly harm one’s reputation if the counterpart finds out about the deception — as it often happens after the fact.

All this suggests that you should think twice before you succumb to the temptation to palter in work situations in which you feel tempted to hide information that may put you at a disadvantage. Though paltering may seem the most helpful strategy in such situations in the moment, don’t forget that if the people you’re interacting with discover that you deceived them, they are still going to feel that you misled them. And that could harm your relationship with them.

Excerpted from ‘There’s a Word for Using Truthful Facts to Deceive: Paltering’ by Francesca Gino